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.Five years later, in That Obscure Object of Desire, terrorist activities areagain in evidence, for, as Mathieu sits in his car in a quiet residential area ofSeville in one of the film s early sequences, a terrorist bomb explodes nearby,destroying the vehicle containing a wealthy bourgeois on his way to a bank.Later on, as Mathieu arrives at his country house near Paris, bent on makinglove to Conchita, police cars race past in response to a terrorist attack on apower-station.And, at the end of the film, when he and Conchita arewindow-shopping, a loudspeaker announcement warns of the activities ofleft-wing extremist groups who have carried out numerous atrocities,including an assassination attempt on the Archbishop of Sienna, and whohave provoked an equally violent response from right-wing extremist groups.The announcement precedes an even bigger explosion than that towards thebeginning of the film.And if, in one sense, the explosions that occur at inter-vals suggest Mathieu s desire for Conchita and its disruptive effect on him,they also point to the unease that revolutionary or terrorist movements createin the bourgeois mind.Indeed, it is no coincidence that both The DiscreetCharm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire were madeafter the left-wing student riots in Paris in 1968, for Buñuel, who was in Parisat the time checking locations for The Milky Way, saw clear parallels betweenthe students and the surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s (Buñuel, 125).Thestudent opposition to traditional conservative values, which undoubtedlycreated apprehension in French bourgeois circles, was thus a direct influencein relation to Buñuel s aim in these films to disrupt the otherwise tranquilfaçade of the middle and upper classes.As the preceding argument suggests, Buñuel s scrutiny of the bourgeoisieis comprehensive and minute, engaging his attention from his first film to hislast, even if in later years his attitude becomes not so much outraged asmocking and ironic.But if his films repeatedly reveal the elegance of bour-geois houses, the ritualistic nature of bourgeois life, and all the imperfections,moral or otherwise, that lie behind the bourgeois façade, they also suggestthat, far from crumbling to dust, this is a social class distinguished by itsresilience and capacity for survival.The point is tellingly made in The Exter-minating Angel, for there Nobile and his companions, despite the trials ofhunger, thirst and degradation they are obliged to endure, emerge relativelyunscathed from their incarceration, rising Phoenix-like from the ashes tocontinue their former way of life.They possess, in effect, a survival instinctwhich, strangely, stems from their complacency and self-assurance, for thisenables them to shrug off and surmount the inconveniences that come theirway, a point effectively made in the persistence displayed by the characters ofThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in their pursuit of a meal regardless ofthe disappointments they experience.The surrealists may have wished, as wehave seen, to explode the social order, to transform life itself (Buñuel, 107), BUÑUEL AND THE BOURGEOISIE 111but Buñuel seems to have realised from an early stage the ultimate futility ofthat aim, that we do not live in the best of possible worlds , and that themost a creative artist can do is express that view in whatever form he seesfit. THANK GOD I M STILL AN ATHEIST4 THANK GOD I M STILL AN ATHEISTSurrealist opposition to the conventional values embodied in westernsociety and embraced by the bourgeoisie in particular, inevitably meant thatreligion, and especially the kind of morality advocated by the CatholicChurch, would become a major focus of attack.As we have already seen,freedom of all kinds lay at the heart of surrealist beliefs, be it the freedomfrom the dictates of reason allowed by instinct and passion, the freedom asso-ciated with the imagination, or that connected with dreams and the expres-sion of the unconscious mind.Christianity, on the other hand, based in parton the dictates of the Commandments that thou shall not , was seen by thesurrealists to be essentially restrictive of the freedom that they worshipped,and, because religious teaching formed such a central part of the educationprovided by Catholic schools throughout Europe, to be a decisive and detri-mental influence upon young and developing minds.Furthermore, the Cath-olic Church was regarded by the surrealists as walking hand in hand with thebourgeoisie, the latter contributing financially to the well-being of theformer, and the Church supporting the bourgeoisie in its suppression of thelower classes and in its championing of traditional moral values.In thiscontext, it is not difficult to understand the close links between many of thesurrealists and the communists, for both sought a revolution in society thatwould free the individual, the latter in an economic sense, the former in amoral and spiritual sense, from the power hitherto exercised over them byothers
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